How do Italians talk about email? Even in English we don't all use the same spelling. Some people write it as one word; some use a hyphen. We also use email as a verb in English, too: "I'll email you." Language doesn't stay the same. It evolves.

In Italian, too, "email" as a word, and as a concept, receives different treatment from different people. Be that as it may, the official name for email is la postaelettronica. It makes sense: the electronic mail.

And if you say la postaelettronica, you won't be wrong. But la posta elettronica actually stands for email in general, or even the inbox itself. One single email is more like unmessaggio di postaelettronica.

Still, more and more frequently, Italians use English words when talking about computers and the internet.

Since saying la postaelettronica every time can get old pretty quickly, the English term emailhas been adopted by many Italians. It's certainly quicker to say than la postaelettronica or unmessaggio di postaelettronica. But there's a basic problem. La posta is a feminine noun, so it makes sense for email to be feminine, too. So it might become la email. But how to pronounce the "E"?

Vowels: Many Italians don't fully realize that we Americans pronounce the "E" in "email" like the letter "E." We say email, e-book, ezine, e-commerce, etc. In Italian, an "E" is pronounced more like the "A" in make.

Italians learn to pronounce just about every letter they see. There are rules. But when they come upon foreign words, they can have a hard time imagining a pronunciation different from what think it should be by following the rules. As in most languages, people invent a version of a foreign word that sounds good or right to them.

And regarding the word "mail," an average Italian who doesn't know English would pronounce the "mai" in "mail" as something more akin to "my." So it's actually a very difficult word to pronounce.

To pronounce email in a similar way to English, an Italian would write something like ìmeil. Pretty weird, right?

Accent: In English, we put the accent on the "E," and when the word came into being, there was a hyphen so it was easier to figure this out, but Italians don't necessarily realize that it's the letter "E" as an abbreviation for "electronic." They just read it as they see it and the accent ends up on "mail."

So we get la email or worse, una email, with two vowels juxtaposed: "A" followed by "E," neither of which is accented. It's awkward.

So lots of people just shorten email to mail.

Ti mandounamail. I'll send you an email.

In the latest episode of La Ladra, someone is sending some files via email. But what they say is via mail. It has become very common to say it this way.

Can you provide your email address in Italian? If you can't remember how to say the names of the letters, check out Marika's video. If you have trouble making yourself understood, check out this handy telephone alphabet. Remember that punto (point, period, full stop, dot) is what you say for the dot in "dot com." In Italy, some email addresses end in "com," but many end in it for Italy. Sometimes it gets spelled "I-T" but sometimes it gets pronounced as a word, as in the previous example.

Italians use English words more and more frequently, but they might differ from the original in meaning and in pronunciation, so they might be the hardest words to understand when an Italian is using them in the middle of an Italian sentence.

In our last lesson, there was mention of the Italian comparative adjective migliore (better). This brought up an excellent question on the part of one of our readers. What's the difference between migliore and meglio? They both mean "better." When should we use meglio instead of migliore?

It's a great question, because the answer is not so simple. On a very basic level, migliore is an adjective and is the comparative of buono (good). It is also, with the addition of an article, the superlative of buono (good), as in the following example.

La moto è il mezzo migliore per superare il traffico.

The motorbike is the best means of transportation for getting past the traffic.

But meglio has a gray area, too, and is much more flexible than migliore. Unlike migliore, which is either an adjective or a noun, meglio, in addition to being an adverb, is often also used colloquially as an adjective or in some contexts as a noun. It's also used in a huge number of expressions.

In one of this week's videos, we find two words in contexts that could use a bit of explaining.

We're watching the first segment of a new episode of L'Eredità (the inheritance). To start off the show, there's the usual banter between the host and the contestants with some introductions. It just so happens that one of the contestants has a last name prone to getting joked about.

The name looks innocent enough, but scarafone (also scarrafone, scaraffone, scardafone,scordofone) is another word for scarafaggio (cockroach). There's an expression in Italian, and you will see this on the WordReference page for scarafaggio: ogniscarafaggiosembrabelloa suamadre (every cockroach is beautiful to its mother). There are other ways to interpret this, from "a face only a mother could love" to "even a homely child is beautiful to his mother."

Pino Daniele, a famous Neapolitan singer-songwriter made this phrase famous in one of his songs. He used the Neapolitan variant, scarrafone, which is also the title: 'O Scarrafone, so when someone has a last name like that, it's almost impossible not to think of Pino Daniele's song if you've ever heard it. You can listen to the song here. There is no actual video, just the album cover, but the text in Italian is there, too.

Another word that is good to be able to recognize in a special context is culo. It is an informal word for buttocks, but Italians (informally only, prego!) use it to mean "luck."

But on TV, for example, such words might not be not acceptable, so the contestant's brother says ilfattoreC and everyone knows what he is talking about. The host then explains jokingly that "C" stands for culturale (cultural) not culo.

Daniela is back with some more Italian lessons, classroom-style. This time she will be teaching us how to compare things. And the good news is that apart from a few exceptions like buono (good), migliore (better), il/la migliore (the best), you won't have to learn the comparative forms of an adjective. Basically, you just have to use the adverb più (more) or meno (less).

Sometimes this corresponds to the English, because in English, not all adjectives have a comparative form.

So, if you are translating, you have to find the "right" word in English. But as you become more familiar with Italian, you will start thinking in Italian, and the English equivalent won't really come into play.

One tricky thing is that you have to take into account whether you are comparing things or actions. The preposition you use, di (than) as opposed to che (than), will change accordingly.

This lesson is based on the premise that you basically know how to form the plural of nouns. To help you get caught up, very generally, if a noun ends in "o," it's usually masculine and the plural usually will end in "i." If it ends in "e," the plural will also likely end in "i", and if a singular noun ends in "a," (usually feminine), the plural will most likely end in "e." To learn more, check out Daniela's lessons about plurals here and here.

There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. In two different videos this week, we find unconventional plurals, one of which is well worth knowing, and one that you likely won't run into every day.

In one video, Arianna goes to Lucca. She learns that Lucca still has its ancient walls: le mura. The singular is il muro (the wall).

To help you remember the name for "wall," in Italian, think of a mural, which is a piece of art, like a painting or enlarged photograph, right on a wall. Or think of "intramural" — within the walls of a school or institution.

Anna and Marika are busy in the kitchen dealing with fish, and more specifically, anchovies. They are pretty small fish, so taking out the guts is a tedious job they gladly leave to the fish vendor.

You might be familiar with the adjective interiore (inside, internal, interior) but there is a noun, leinteriora, which means "the guts," "the entrails," or "the internal organs," and is always in the plural: interiora.

This is also the meaning in Yabla's most recent video about Firenze, where the camera operator finds herself in danger of being investita (run over).Even pedestrian areas like the Ponte Vecchio require staying alert for stray taxis or delivery trucks.

Lots of adjectives in Italian correspond to adjectives in English and vice versa, but sometimes an adjective form doesn't really exist in one language or the other, and a different form is used. One such form uses a (which is usually a preposition meaning "to" or "at") plus a noun. In this case, we might say this a stands for "in the manner of" or "with." It can be part of the answer to questions such as "What's it like?" "What kind is it?"

One example of this came up in this week's episode of La Ladra. It occurred in a rather banal exchange between Gina and her husband. He couldn't find his striped socks.

In English, we can say something is striped or it has stripes. In Italian, it's a bit different. We often use a.

In Italy, quaderni a quadretti (notebooks with grids or graph paper) are very popular. But in the U.S., unless you are using a grid for a specific purpose, like math or a making a chart, most notebooks are a righe (lined). There doesn't even seem to be a standard translation for a quadretti regarding paper. However, we asked readers to write in what they would call un quaderno a quadretti in English.

Update: Most of the people who have written in say that in English, they would call a quaderno a quadretti a "graph paper notebook." One person provided this interesting link.

Additional notes: Along with notebooks, we have notepads. The official word for this in Italian is taccuino but the more commonly-used term is a corruption of English: bloc-notes or even the pseudo-English block-notes. Make sure you pronounce the final e and s all'italiano! Let's remember that in Italian the adjective usually comes after the noun, and so notes is the kind of blocco (notebook or notepad for taking notes). A blocco is a group of similar items, so we use blocco or, when it's small, blocchetto for paper, for checks: blocchetto di assegni (checkbook).

In this lesson, we have talked about adjective equivalents. But there are adverb equivalents that use a, too, and we'll look at them in a future lesson.

Here, although the color yellow does play an important role, un giallo is something specific: a crime, mystery or detective story. Note: The moderator of the quiz show uses giallo as an adjective: i racconti gialli (the detective stories) and it is common to say un romanzogiallo (a detective novel), to specify the format, but giallo as a noun encompasses any format and is widely used and understood by Italians.

In 1929, Mondadori, a major Italian publishing house, came out with a series of detective novels. They were tascabili (in paperback, literally "pocket-sized") and had a distinguishing yellow cover. They were called I librigiallidella Mondadori (Mondadori's Yellow Books). In 1946, the name of these books changed to I gialli Mondadori. The name giallocaught on, and has been used ever since to indicate a detective, crime, or police mystery, and can be applied to books, comic books (as in Diabolik mentioned on the quiz show), movies, or even news events. Giallo with this meaning has become a word everyone should know, especially if you like to read. And it can't be guessed at if you don't know the story. But now you know the story, too.

You may have heard of an American television series from the eighties and nineties called Murder, She Wrote with Angela Lansbury. This series, dubbed into Italian, became extremely popular (and stilll is) as La Signora in Giallo (The Lady in Yellow). This play on words should make sense to you now!

Read this article (in Italian) for more information about the Italian version of the show, and, why not? Find it for streaming in Italian, just for fun.

Pendolare is originally a verb having to do with the movement of a pendulum, or pendolo, but it is now commonly used to mean "commuter." Italy is a long, narrow penisola(peninsula) with mountains in the middle. Many people live in one place but work in another. Rather than actually moving, they become pendolari(commuters). Being a pendolare is tough, and often complicated, so if you listen to the news, you'll hear the word pendolare often. A pendolare may travel by car (in macchina), by bike (in bici) by bus (in pullman), by train (in treno), or by plane (in aereo). Note the preposition in ! But generally, when we think of pendolari, we imagine them on trains. Nowadays, people have phones (cellulari), laptops (portatili), or tablets (tablet) to occupy them while traveling by train, but it wasn't always so. People used to read libri (books), riviste (magazines), or giornali (newspapers). A certain kind of book was particularly popular. Il giallo. See the lesson about it!

The cooks also use two other verbs that have to do with breaking something down into smaller pieces. Let's look at each of these three words to see when we use them, and what the differences are among them.

Let's start with the word that gives its name to the dish. Pestare is the verb: to crush, to mash, to pound. We carry out this action when tenderizing meat, or when stepping on someone's toes.

Oh, scusami, t'hopestato il piede. Oh, sorry, I stepped on your foot.

Pestare is the action someone or something carries out in order to crush something. Except for when it's someone's toes, we might think of a repeated action, such as in making pesto the old-fashioned way. Just keep pounding to break the material down little by little.

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A relative of pestare is calpestare (to tromp on, to trample, to step on), specific to using one's feet. You might see a sign that says:

In English we use "do," "did" or other question words to form questions. This is hard for Italians learning English because in Italian, to ask a question, all you have to do is change your tone of voice.

Here's an example from last week's lesson. Marika is telling us something.

To turn this into a question, it remains the same in Italian. Only the inflection changes, and in writing it, we use a question mark rather than a period.

Possooffrirleuno "Spritz"?Can I offer you a "Spritz?"

Try making statements into questions by changing your inflection, or adding "no?" at the end, to make it into a question. Pay special attention to how questions happen in videos with plenty of dialogue, such as La Ladra or Commissario Manara.

The passatoremoto (remote past) tense in Italian may not be necessary to know in order to converse in the language, but we find it often enough in writing when the subject is history, so it's good to be familiar with it.

Daniela has recently finished talking about this tense in her Corso di Italiano, and in the final segment, she talks about when it is used.

In this week's video about Pisa, we see it in action. Arianna is talking about medieval times.

Già dall'inizio ebbe dei problemi, perché fu costruita su un terreno instabile e per questo pende. From the start, it had problems because it was built on unstable terrain and because of this, it leans.Captions 17 -18, In giro per l'Italia - Pisa e dintorni - Part 1 of 3

Another place we find the passatoremoto being employed is in stories and fairy tales. In fact, reading fairy tales is an excellent way to gain familiarity with the passatoremoto. The stories are usually repetitive and predictable with the verbs in the third person singular and plural.Yabla has quite a few animated fairy tales to choose from.

Further practice: To make friends with the passatoremoto, pick out a fairy tale and watch the video, paying extra attention to the verbs. Then open the transcript, pick the printer-friendly version so you can just see the Italian, and then read the story out loud (in Italian), as if you were reading it to a child. You will, of course, see verbs in other tenses like the passatoprossimo and theimperfetto, too. As in English, a mixture of tenses renders the story more fluid and more interesting.

If you're not sure which tense you are looking at, click on the word, even when you are in theprinter-friendly version, and a dictionary will pop up to help you. Some verbs occur only occasionally, and don't really need to be assimilated, but other verbs like avere (to have) essere (to be), andare(to go), venire (to come), guardare (to look), and vedere (to see) will occur more often, and you can start adding them to the verbs you recognize, even in thepassatoremoto. Reading out loud will make the verbs start feeling right on the tongue.

Hopefully, when you watch the video again, the verbs in the passatoremoto won't seem so strange anymore.

WordReference has conjugation charts for most verbs. Try keeping the tab open so you can get to it easily when you need it.

In a recent segment of La Ladra, Eva and Dante are in the kitchen of the restaurant. Dante is trying to win Eva's affections by cooking irresistible dishes. He makes a reference to the famous star-crossed lovers, Paolo and Francesca, mentioned in the fifth Canto of Dante's Inferno. In it, Francesca recounts that she and Paolo had been reading in the Arthurian legends about Lancelot and Guinevere and how they had fallen in love as if under a spell, helped along by Galehaut, or Gallehaud, and called Galeotto in Italian. The spell seemed to affect Paolo and Francesca, too, and they fell in love immediately, as if struck by the book itself.

There have been plenty of discussions about the adjective galeotto on language forums and it's almost impossible to find an English adjective that fits the bill. So we thought it was worth discussing what this word is all about.

Have you ever fallen in love and blamed it on the le stelle (the stars), la luna (the moon), unacanzone (a song), unasituazione (a situation), unaparola (a word), un film (a movie)? That's what galeotto is about.

È stata la luna galeotta. It was the romantic moon [that made us fall in love].

Attenzione, the noun galeotto also means "galley slave" and has come to mean "jailbird" or "inmate."

In this lesson, we’ll talk about a curious use of the noun imbarazzo (embarrassment). But first let’s look at another word associated with embarrassment: the noun la vergogna and the verb vergognarsi (to be ashamed, to be embarrassed). Here, you need context to help decide if someone is ashamed or embarrassed because they're closely tied.

The above translation uses an English idiom, which comes from an 18th-century French play. “Embarras” in French means “embarrassment” or “confusion.” We could also say that the choice is overwhelming or almost embarrassing, because every item is worthy of being chosen.

L’imbarazzo dellascelta is a great expression to be familiar with because it’s used quite often when someone is a presented with a vast choice of great things to choose from, for example: What Italian city would you like to visit? C'è solo l'imbarazzodellascelta. The problem is choosing one!

In previous lessons, we’ve mentioned that the subjunctive is often used after the conjunction che (that). The congiuntivo (subjunctive) can be tricky for Italians, not only for non-native speakers, so it’s fitting that conjugating a verb in the subjunctive be used as a challenge in a quiz show such as the one featured this week on Yabla.

The contestant has to conjugate a verb in the present subjunctive, first person. Note that when Italians conjugate the subjunctive mood, they add che(that), the person, and then the subjunctive conjugation. That way, the subjunctive is distinguished from the indicative.

In the above-mentioned episode, we have the infinitive and the first person present subjunctive of several verbs. Can you provide the present indicative of the verbs mentioned? You can look up a verb’s conjugation here.

Some people are adept at memorizing lists of verb conjugations. Others might prefer to learn verbs in the subjunctive on a need-to-know basis, one by one. You will discover that certain verbs are used more often than others in the subjunctive, verbs such as:

These are the verbs to learn early on. What verbs would you like to add to this list?

After practicing the first person subjunctive, move on to the other persons, one by one, and get the hang of them. In many cases, the third person is the same as the first person in the subjunctive. Using them in sentences will help you remember them.

To brush up or learn about the subjunctive, see Daniela’s lessons about the subjunctive here.

For English speakers, Italian can be difficult to pronounce, especially when reading. Watching, listening, and doing the exercises Yabla provides can all help reinforce correct pronunciation, but let’s zoom in on one of the basic sounds.

We’re not looking for the nuances here, of which there are plenty, but just the very bare bones.

In Italian, the vowels, in particular, sound so different from what they look like to an English speaker, so let’s start there.

Let’s have a look at pronouncing the letter "A."

To hear the Italian “A” click on the audio icon here, and you can hear the correct pronunciation and repeat it. Maybe you can find a word in English that you pronounce with this sound. Some people find the noun "father" helpful for this sound, and others won't. The Italian "A" sound has no diphthong in it, and never sounds like a long "A," as in April.

Let’s take the word naso (nose). If you pronounce the "A" as you do in "ah!," you will come pretty close!

In fact, if we look carefully, there are plenty of words containing the letter "A" in this one sentence. Listen to the video, and you will hear that they are all pronounced the same way. Listen to how Marika and Anna pronounce each others’ names. It’s the same kind of "A."

Try pronouncing the title. Italia a tavola (Italy at the Table).

In a recent segment of La Ladra (try pronouncing the title), there’s a word that’s very similar to its English counterpart, but the "A’s" sound a bit different.

Here's a great little expression of relief. Literally, it means "less bad." It's about the relief you feel when worse didn't come to worst! In English we usually say "good thing" or "it's a good thing." We might even say "luckily" or "thank goodness." In the example below, meno male is used with che in a sentence.

Note that sometimes it's used as one word menomale, and sometimes two: meno male. They're both correct, although some dictionaries will say the two-word version is more proper.

Practice:

When you feel relief that something went better than expected or when you would say "whew!" having avoided a disaster, try saying menomale all by itself. For pronunciation help, listen to some examples by doing a search in the videos tab.

In a recent video, Marika and Anna show us how to make fricos, a local dish from northern Italy. They are made with humble ingredients, but take a bit of slicing and dicing. So Marika rolls up her sleeves. Italians use this expression both literally and figuratively, as we do in English.

In this first example, Marika is speaking literally, and uses the verb tirare (to pull). That's one way to describe the action of rolling up one's sleeves, and perhaps the easiest to pronounce.

Rimboccare (to tuck in, to turn) refers to the edge of something, like a sleeve, a hem, or a sheet, but it's very commonly used in the above-mentioned expression, especially when acknowledging a long job ahead.